Patrick Holden walks through the fields, stopping every now and then to bend over and point out bumblebees, cabbage butterflies and dung beetles. The blue sky spreads above. Beneath the rolling green hills are vast hedgerows, with only the jagged tips of Wales’ Cumbrian Mountains breaking the horizon. Deliciousness bathed in sunlight.
“Do you see that bumblebee grabbing the clover?” he asked in a strained, breathless voice. “Birds, insects, butterflies, small mammals, bats…the biodiversity of this place is incredible.” All this is here, he says, because he farms in harmony with nature. say.
Holden says the secret to this little oasis is how he uses his land. He joins a growing number of farmers who are breaking away from traditional methods and utilizing practices such as cover crops, minimal tillage, managed grazing, and diverse crop rotations to rebuild soil health and fertility. I’m alone. This is, in some ways, a reversal of agriculture, when yields were less important, industrialization was no longer the norm, and small farms dabbled in many things rather than specializing in one thing. Return to state.
Holden’s main crops are oats and peas, which are sown in rotation with grasslands to increase soil fertility. These are then turned into ‘muesli’, which is used as additional feed for grass-fed cows and pigs. Pig manure makes the land fertile. Milked from sleek Ayrshire cows, the milk is curdled into the farm’s award-winning cheddar cheese. Woven into everything is the intention to work with and imitate nature.
The claimed benefits are significant: healthy soil retains water and nutrients, supports biodiversity, reduces erosion, and produces nutritious food. But in a rapidly warming world, there is another important benefit. That’s because these farming methods suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and put it back into the soil. As well as making cheese, Holden farms carbon through regenerative practices.
Soil is second only to the ocean in its ability to absorb carbon. hold more It’s better than the atmosphere and all the plants and forests on Earth combined. But centuries of destructive industrial agriculture have depleted the planet and emitted vast amounts of carbon dioxide.2 Into the ether.
according to According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, many cultivated soils have lost 50 to 70 percent of their original carbon. If you countone-third of the excess CO2 In the atmosphere, life arose in the soil and was released not by burning fossil fuels, but by changing the way Earth’s land is used.
“People ask, ‘Where does the excess carbon come from?’ That’s where we destroyed the soil,” says John, an American soil microbiologist and founder of an organization that teaches growers how to regenerate soil. says Elaine Ingham, founder of Soil Food Web. “Every time you plow, you lose 50 percent of your energy.” soil organic matter” she says, referring to the compounds that trap carbon in the earth.
There is no agreement on exactly how much carbon soils can hold, and estimates vary widely about the potential impact of regenerative agriculture. for example, Rodale Institute, regenerative agriculture nonprofitreviewed peer-reviewed research and agronomists’ observations and concluded that if regenerative agriculture were adopted globally, 100 percent of annual carbon emissions could be sequestered.
